Wednesday, January 03, 2007

The Home Office's own figures showed crime on the rise last year and more criminals being caught by police, yet the numbers being sent before the court dropped sharply by eight per cent year-on-year.

Opposition critics blamed the dramatic rise in the use of "summary justice" - instant fines or cautions and warnings handed out by the police - and accused the Government of creating an "arbitrary" justice system, letting off hundreds of thousands of criminals with punishments no tougher than a parking ticket.

In the year to June 2006 the British Crime Survey measured 11,016,000 offences against adults living in households in England and Wales - up from 10,912,000 in 2005.

However an analysis by independent statisticians - accepted by the Home Office - shows that the British Crime Survey counts only a third of all crimes as it ignores all offences against businesses including shoplifting, "victimless" crimes such as drug possession and any offences committed against under-16s.

Ministers are encouraging greater use of these rapid punishments even for relatively serious crimes such as shoplifting, to avoid clogging up the courts and to ease the prison overcrowding crisis.

Does anyone know when we will actually start punishing criminals? All crimes should be dealt with in court. It doesn’t matter how minor they are.Yes it would cost a lot of money to do this but every sentence should also accompany two fines. One, straight after the trial which covers the costs of the investigation and one after their prison sentence which covers the full cost of their stay in the prison.

Trials cost a lot of money. Judges get paid £120,000 per year but Magistrates (which have no legal experience) don’t get paid anything except for expenses and deal with minor crimes. If I was to change anything I would make a third type of judge. This judge would have legal experience but not as much as a normal judge. Basically they would have the equivalent knowledge of a legal executive. This new judge would be paid around £25,000 per year and deal with moderately serious crimes which would leave the main judges to deal with the serious crimes. It wouldn’t take long. Judges only get 1 weeks training anyway.

If you have ever been to a trial which I have (college trip) you would be able to see that judges are pretty useless because they basically only sum up the trial and sentence the criminal and an administrator could easily do that, infact anyone could do it. This might be different in trials for serious crimes. I don’t know because I only got to see the trial of a wife beater (guilty), robber (innocent) and a drink driver (guilty). I chickened out just as I was about to go and see a trial of a man accused of raping his 10 year old son.

Having a ‘middle judge’ would substantially cut the bill of the courts and there would be more judges found which would speed up the process. Judges don’t become judges for the money. They do it because they look good in front of their peers. Why else would you take a pay cut of more than 50% to be a judge? Yes that right. Barristers can easily earn £250,000 per year while judges are paid £120,000 per year.

The appallingly low detection and conviction rates indicated serve to confirm what David Fraser revealed in his detailed work, A Land Fit for Criminals.

He was a probation officer for 26 years.

The policing side of the story is given by PC 'David Copperfield,' in Wasting Police Time.

The police are heavily burdened by bureaucracy, even those who actually want to do the business.

Copperfield reveals the time when he was the only police officer available 'on the beat' for a town of 60,000 inhabitants. However, the staff car park at the station was full - vast numbers of officers were inside, tapping away on their keyboards.

Peter Hitchens's A Brief History of Crime is also good - showing how many senior police officers are university graduates with a 'criminals' rights' approach to policing. Brian Paddick is a good example. On the very morning of the 7/7 atrocity, while rescue workers were still extricating bodies from tangled wreckage, Paddick stated that "Islam and terror should not be connected in the same sentence."

Fills you with confidence, doesn't it?

(Some years ago, the police also decided that so-called 'homophobic incidents' were to be regarded as 'very serious crimes.' Murder, assault, arson, robbery etc. are only designated as 'serious crimes.' Priorities!)

But then, why gaol criminals if they will vote Labour? It also saves the Treasury money to pass the costs of crime on to the community.

I have said before that we should get rid of the majority of the paperwork that has to be filled in and then hire administrators to fill in the paperwork that needs to be filled in. police should be given police work to do and not admin work.

I am not proud to admit this, but I have been on the wrong side of the law on numerous occaisions, the most recent being a charge of 'Racially Aggravated GBH With Intent" which carries a possible life sentence ( in my brothers case, he has two previous convictions for this offence, and under the 'three strikes and you're out' rule a life sentence is mandatory).

At trial, the judge (a woman) concluded that the charges against myself and my younger brother were brought about more through 'fear of the system (ie, being branded racist)' than through any evidence against us: she also expressed concern that if we challenged the charges and any ensuing conviction that we would be cleared in the court of appeal, which would bring her good name into disrepute.

On this basis she found us both NOT GUILTY and warned the prosecution that if if they ever brought a similar case into her court she would throw it out immediately.

We were acquitted of all charges, but only because we had a decent judge who could see that we were scapegoats for the system that insists 'only white people can commit racist crimes'.

My advice to anyone prosecuted for a racial offence is this:

Study your rights pertaining to the crime you have been charged with, because you cannot trust a barrister to defend you as you would defend yourself.

alanorei "happens a lot with these ethnics" I think to be honest we are all ethnics in that we all have an ethnicity. I presume you mean minorities but isn't it true that a judicial inquiry established that the Met Police was institutionally racist. Not merely that, but that search and arrest powers are mostly used against blacks and Asians because they are black and Asian. As for Kevin Hughes I understand he was arrested and put in jail for assaulting an Asian person in a pub I would have thought that the police should be commended for that.

but that search and arrest powers are mostly used against blacks and Asians because they are black and Asian

This is because asians and blacks commit a disproportianate amount of crime.

As for Kevin Hughes I understand he was arrested and put in jail for assaulting an Asian person in a pub I would have thought that the police should be commended for that.

He was arrersted for assaulting an asylum seeker eventhough the only witness to the alleged assault was the asylum seeker. the many other witnesses said there was no assault and they were just arguing.